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In Iraq, Western Clocks, but Middle Eastern Time

PERIOD PIECE The excavation of Samarra in Iraq, with the Askariya Mosque, a Shiite holy site, in the distance early in the 20th century.Credit
Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution

BAGHDAD — There was an exchange some months ago about the notion of time that said a little bit about Iran, something about Iraq, but probably most about the United States.

At the sidelines of a United Nations meeting, Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s foreign minister, chatted with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The American military had left Iraqi cities — thankfully, in the eyes of many here. By Aug. 31, it was supposed to bring its numbers down to 50,000. The dates had less to do with the prowess of the Iraqi police in Sadr City and more with priorities elsewhere: shifting resources to Afghanistan, weariness with a costly war never quite understood at home, and the unpredictability of midterm elections in, say, southwestern Pennsylvania.

The Americans planted a tree in Iraq, Mr. Zebari recalled Mr. Ahmadinejad telling him, with the stilted sympathy of sarcasm. They watered that tree, pruned it and cared for it. “Ask your American friends,” he said, shaking his head, “why they’re leaving now before the tree bears fruit.”

The story in Iraq is unfinished, whatever the Obama administration, and the generals and diplomats who do its bidding, may say. The country is neither occupied nor independent, but rather in a limbo whose descriptions are as pliable as the pretexts for the invasion that began America’s seven-year involvement here. Through those years, the experience was colored by promises that sometimes sounded like propaganda to Iraqis: democracy, good governance and better lives. But its one constant was perhaps time.

Iraq today is replete with American-ordered deadlines, timetables and benchmarks that sought to create realities where realities never existed. The administration is leaving now on its own terms. Perhaps staying would make an already traumatized Iraq worse; much of its dysfunction dates to the American occupation and its earliest days. But the very nature of America’s departure — with no government formed, an unpredictable Iraqi military, and deep popular disenchantment with a hapless political elite — underscores one of the most enduring traits of American strategy in the Middle East.

Powerful but fickle, the United States has never seemed to understand time, at least not in the way it is acknowledged by Islamic activists willing to serve decades in jail, Syrian presidents assured that American policies will eventually change, and Iraq’s neighbors, who bide their turn to fill the vacuum left by an American departure.

Its policies — support for Israel and authoritarian Arab governments, the invasion of Iraq and war in Afghanistan — may shape sentiments toward it. But time, an American measure of it, often shapes the way it acts.

“It certainly is American politics and it is American culture, the sense that we are an impatient people,” said Ryan C. Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq and veteran diplomat in the Arab world. “ ‘Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, at the latest, and if that’s not going to happen, we’re going to move on.’ ”

The Middle East has long suffered under a peculiarly American notion that if the world’s greatest power wants something, it will somehow come to pass, on its schedule. In Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Syria, the messy realities never quite fit. Since 2003, they rarely have in Iraq, either.

The occupation ended, at least formally, in summer 2004, before Iraq’s midterm elections. Elections proceeded whether Iraq was ready or not, sometimes helping exacerbate divisions rather than bridge them. The American withdrawal may reflect a new reality, but its timing has proceeded regardless of political progress.

“Patience is always in short supply in Washington,” said Mr. Zebari, wondering what that meant for Iran, Turkey and Iraq’s other neighbors.

“The dates have been set for U.S. disengagement. This has encouraged our neighbors to position themselves in the vacuum. This is what is happening. I have heard it from them,” he said. “They’re waiting, they’re not in a hurry, they’re not in a rush. They are our eternal neighbors.”

American officials’ perspective on the withdrawal usually dictates how they see this notion of time, in particular whether deadlines reflect the ambiguous reality here these days. The military calls the timing right, as do many diplomats, even if they acknowledge the impact of American domestic politics.

Photo

BAGHDAD IN 1950 The past lives in the present for Iraq and its neighbors.Credit
Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

“Look, when you spend several trillion dollars in a country, some of your political issues are going to spill into that country, that’s just the reality,” said Christopher R. Hill, the outgoing ambassador, whose mandate was to reshape the American role in Iraq by a specific deadline.

But, Mr. Hill added, “The notion that this country has been mortgaged to our political interests is simply not accurate.”

His predecessor, Mr. Crocker, called it more of a burden. “It was a constant fight,” he said. “ ‘We’re tired of this, too much in blood and treasure, it isn’t working, we have to move on.’ It was a constant battle. ‘If we don’t get X number of benchmarks, by Y date, that equals Z, which is failure.’ Our whole notion that we can somehow develop a mathematical model that includes concrete achievements, factor in a time frame and voilà. Iraq doesn’t work that way and Afghanistan doesn’t work that way.”

It is perhaps a cliché, the way the past intersects with the present in the Middle East, though not necessarily untrue.

In the serpentine alleys around the shrine of Kadhimiya in Baghdad, beside the tumult of Al Hussein in Cairo’s venerable old city and along the majesty of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, what has been here is often more palpable than what is here now. For Arabs, the Crusades resonate in the creation of Israel. Wars in Iraq are cast in millennium-old narratives of suffering and martyrdom.

Perspective becomes politics. So does patience.

In a tumultuous time in 2005, Syria was beset by a crisis some deemed existential. There were rumors that an international tribunal investigating the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister would indict some of its leaders. Sprawling protests had helped force it to leave Lebanon, where many reviled its 29-year presence. The United States had withdrawn its ambassador in a bid to isolate it.

The most knowing officials, though, seemed confident that their horizons were broader, longer and more historical than the Americans.

President Bashar al-Assad had learned from his father, Hafez, the air force commander who ruled Syria as strongman for three decades and knew perhaps better than anyone that time was a tool. “There was the master manipulator of time, and someone who understood everybody’s clock — Middle Eastern clocks, Western clocks, the American clock,” Mr. Crocker said.

“That legacy has passed on to his son, against all odds,” he added. “They’ve done pretty darn well. I think history is going to catch up with them ultimately, but ultimately can be a very long time.”

In 2010, a new American ambassador has been nominated, and Syria, in some fashion, has returned to Lebanon. In the Lebanese capital, where protests by tens of thousands once crudely insulted the Syrian president, another banner hung during his first visit to Beirut since the assassination.

“Welcome among your family,” it read.

Amid the timelines and deadlines, half-starts and false starts of American diplomacy in the Middle East, between the grand gestures and follies, there is a counternarrative. It belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, the forefather of Islamic politics in the Arab world that was born in Egypt in 1928. Maamoun al-Hodeibi, a longtime leader who died in 2004, preached a quietism to his supporters in Egypt that some saw as defeatist, but he saw as enduring.

Another round of arrests had depleted the movement’s ranks in the late 1990s. American officials refused to talk to the Brotherhood, deeming engagement recognition, and the Egyptian government was no closer to lifting a ban on the group. Its leadership was under surveillance so suffocating that the license plates of any visitor were recorded.

“In the prisons, there will be a period of training and study,” said Mr. Hodeibi, avuncular, even light-hearted. “In the long run, it will be useful.”

A wry smile followed, as did a proverb.

“God is with the patient,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on August 15, 2010, on Page WK1 of the New York edition with the headline: Western Clocks, but Middle Eastern Time. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe